Three Keys To Good Content

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You’ve read it before: the key to increasing your traffic and making more money with your blog is by writing good content. Everyone says that as if the meaning of “good content” is obvious. But if it really was obvious then we’d all be phenomenally rich and famous bloggers, wouldn’t we?

There’s an obstacle to explaining what constitutes good content, and it’s this: everyone thinks they’re writing it already. And once again, if that were true we’d all be phenomenally rich and famous bloggers, wouldn’t we?

Good content doesn’t just happen. Sure, talent has something to do with it– but so does the willingness to find out what one is doing wrong and then taking the steps to fix it. If you’re still reading at this point, chances are you’ve got the willing part down, so here are three simple steps toward improving your content.

1. Quit being boring.

Think back for a moment to when you were a kid in grade school. Remember how, at the start of every school year, some teacher would have students take turns standing up before the rest of the class and sharing “How I Spent My Summer Vacation”? Remember how you’d start to doze off, fidgeting in your seat and wondering why on earth they interrupted your vacation time for THIS?

If your blog primarily consists of descriptions of how you spent your day it’s just as dull. As Jeff Atwood puts it, “This ain’t your diary“:

[L]et’s be perfectly clear: your readers aren’t coming to your blog to read about you. They’re coming to your blog to find out what it can do for them. If you find your blog turning into a diary of your daily activities, you’ll have a very limited audience unless you happen to be a real world celebrity. Even my wife isn’t particularly interested in the minutiae of what I do every day. Why would I expect my readers to be?

Your life may be infinitely fascinating to you. Everyone else’s lives are equally fascinating to them. If you want readers to take time out of their lives, you’d better come up with something they find more fascinating than themselves.

2. Write something useful.

As I explained in my advice about getting incoming links, good content is something that others find helpful.

Not descriptions of your awful day. Not a review for a company that everyone else has been paid to write about, too. Not even a blurb about some website you found which, chances are, someone else has already found, too.

Linkable content is something that enriches people: your well-written analysis of a news item (quoted and linked from your entry) with which someone can agree or disagree; a “how to” explanation about something you’re knowledgeable on (hint); a gathering of resources on a particular topic.

Take a look on your WordPress dashboard at the last five incoming links (and if you don’t have any recent showing, well, that’s a sign in itself, isn’t it?). The entries that generate links are the ones other people found useful. Write more of them, and less of the other stuff.

3. Work at not sucking.

Writing useful, original content takes thought, creativity and talent. If you find it too difficult, then do something about it. Or not.

If you have something to say, and the talent to say it, then shout it out. But if you have something to say and you don’t know how, then learn. If you don’t have anything to say, and you don’t know how, then please, save the bandwidth for those who do and find other methods of releasing your passion. You don’t have to blog just because everyone else seems to be doing it.

If you’re not ready to abandon blogging but recognize that your content is dull, consider this counterintuitive step: take a break. A long one. If you feel compelled to blog during that time, don’t. Write the topic down, instead, and set it aside. Keep adding to that list until you’ve got 30 or so items on it: enough for a whole month of entries.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 9th, 2008 at 8:45 am and is filed under Blog Better (Blogging 401). Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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